Gerhard Benkowitz

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Gerhard Benkowitz during the trial

Gerhard Benkowitz (born June 2, 1923 in Sudschenka , Soviet Union , † June 29, 1955 in Dresden ) was a resistance fighter of the Combat Group Against Inhumanity against the SED regime in the GDR , who was involved in a show trial for espionage and preparations to blow bridges and a dam was sentenced to death and executed on the instructions of the SED .

Life and family

Gerhard Benkowitz's father was taken prisoner in Russia during the First World War. There he married a Volga German and returned to Germany after the birth of his son. He was a local farmer in the Nazi state.

Benkowitz graduated from high school in Weimar in 1941 and then became an officer candidate in the Wehrmacht . He was wounded in the battle of Kursk in 1943 and studied medicine in Jena for a semester in 1944. After the war he worked as a salesman and later in the city administration of Weimar, from the end of 1946 at SMAD Thuringia. He became a member of the LDPD in 1946 , from which he resigned in the same year. In 1948 he joined the SED. In 1949 he began to study Russian at a technical school and worked as a Russian teacher in Buttstädt from 1950 and in Weimar from 1951, where he became deputy school director in 1954.

Benkowitz had contacted the Combat Group Against Inhumanity (KgU) in West Berlin in 1949 because he hoped to learn something about his father, who had been arrested by the Soviet secret police NKVD in 1945 and who has since disappeared . During the interviews, Benkowitz first sent reports to the KgU.

Benkowitz was married to the teacher Erika Benkowitz († December 27, 2008).

Arrest, show trial and execution

Benkowitz speaks to his defense attorney in the courtroom

Before the arrest, the Ministry for State Security (MfS ), renamed State Secretariat for State Security (SfS) in 1953, had not set up an operational procedure for Gerhard Benkowitz, which indicates that he was targeted by State Security for a very short time. As a traitor to Benkowitz, the then KgU department head for Thuringia Rupprecht Wagner (code name "Wolff") comes into question, who was already a leak in the KgU before he switched to the State Security on September 10, 1955. On April 4, 1955, the SfS arrested the Benkowitzes in Weimar. The State Security initially knew nothing about von Benkowitz's colleagues and only found out about them through his statements. The following day the couple arrested Christa and Hans-Dietrich Kogel (1925–1955). Hans-Dietrich Kogel was the clerk for planning and statistics at the city council of Weimar. At the same time, the dispatcher Willibald Schuster from Großebersdorf, the Reichsbahn employee Gerhard Kammacher and the student Christian Busch, who had no connections to the Benkowitz group, were arrested. They came via the SfS remand prison in Erfurt to the windowless cellar prison "U-Boot" in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . When the SED leadership was planning a show trial before the Supreme Court of the GDR in Berlin at the beginning of 1955 , the SfS also brought Benkowitz into the "submarine" on May 15, 1955.

During the interrogation, Benkowitz stated that he had formed an illegal resistance group for the KgU in the fall of 1950. He had received a weapon with ammunition from an " republican agent", which he then threw into the water. He was ready to keep explosives and incendiary devices, but there was no receipt. He contradicted the allegation that he had accepted explosives. An informant smuggled into his cell gave no contrary information. Because material evidence could not be provided, the SfS dropped the charge. He threw a stink bomb into a pond with which he was supposed to disturb “meetings”. In the summer of 1952 he spied out objects for blasting and sabotage measures, including the Bleilochtalsperre on the Saale, the six-arched railway bridge near Weimar and other objects. A demolition squad was supposed to be housed at Kogel, but it never did. After that, the group's work consisted of "pest work", such as distributing leaflets, collecting information and sending threatening letters to functionaries in the GDR. Since Benkowitz and Kogel provided detailed and largely identical information, the statements can be regarded as correct. The SfS officers who Benko joke worked, and the public defender had convinced him that a detailed self-blame and remorse could save him. Benkowitz believed that and so unwillingly played into the hands of the directors of the show trial.

Even before the trial began, the death sentence against Benkowitz was certain. The functionary Josef Streit in the Justice Department of the Central Committee of the SED had "suggested" it. Klaus Sorgenicht , the head of the department, sent the proposal to the First Secretary of the SED Walter Ulbricht in an in-house communication . Hans-Dietrich Kogel was to be sentenced to 15 years in prison. Ulbricht himself changed this proposal of the Central Committee to “death penalty”, for another he set the sentence to 15 years and signed the whole thing with “I agree. W. Ulbricht ".

On June 22nd and 23rd, 1955, the main hearing before the Supreme Court under President Kurt Schumann took place with great public sympathy, which also included radio broadcasts . The defendants admitted that as spies and terrorists for the KgU they had delivered an enormous number of espionage reports down to the smallest details of everyday life in the GDR, such as production due to a lack of material. A defendant is said to have delayed freight traffic to a considerable extent "without this having been noticed". Benkowitz confessed that he had the "task" to blow up the spied on five bridges in Weimar, high-voltage pylons, power lines and the more than sixty meter high concrete wall of the Saale dam. The process reached a climax when Benkowitz answered the question: "If you would have blown the railway bridge on the Weimar-Jena route even if it had just been driven over by a train full of children", answered "Yes".

According to Ulbricht's proposal, the negotiation ended with death sentences for Gerhard Benkowitz and Hans-Dietrich Kogel. On June 29, the sentence was carried out “in the name of the people”: Both lost their lives under the guillotine in the central execution site of the GDR in Dresden .

Benko joke 'also imprisoned wife Erika condemned the First Criminal Division under Kurt Bieret to 12 years in Erfurt on 20 July 1955 the penitentiary . In the grounds of the judgment it was said, among other things, that she had to assume that her "stories and reports" would be misused for espionage purposes.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gerhard Benkowitz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Roger Engelmann: "Concentrated Beatings": State Security Actions and Political Processes, BStU series of publications , 11, p. 161, online
  2. ↑ Gerhard Finn: The resistance work of the combat group against inhumanity (PDF; 330 kB) , in: Overcoming injustice - SED dictatorship and resistance. (Current Political Issues, No. 38), St. Augustin 1996.
  3. ↑ For the following details see Rudi Beckert: The first and last instance. Show and secret trials before the Supreme Court of the GDR . Keip, Goldbach 1995, ISBN 3805102437 , pp. 273-277;
  4. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Roger Engelmann: "Concentrated Beatings": State Security Actions and Political Processes, BStU series of publications , 11, p. 162, online
  5. ^ Eberhard Wendel: Ulbricht as judge and executioner. Stalinist justice on behalf of the party . Structure, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-351-02452-5 , pp. 97-102, there the document in facsimile, p. 100.
  6. ^ Quotes from Eberhard Wendel: Ulbricht as judge and executioner. Stalinist justice on behalf of the party . Structure, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-351-02452-5 , p. 101.
  7. ^ Petra Weber: Justice and Dictatorship. Administration of justice and political criminal justice in Thuringia 1945–1961. (= Sources and representations on contemporary history 46), Munich, Oldenbourg 2000, p. 451.
personal data
SURNAME Benkowitz, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighters against the SED dictatorship and show trial victims in the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Sudschenka , Soviet Union
DATE OF DEATH June 29, 1955
Place of death Dresden